Google Chrome Uses Graphics Card to Accelerate SVG, CSS

Vector-based SVG graphics as well as CSS filters are now accelerated via the GPU and can be activated via chrome://flags in a recent nightly build. The feature is mainly for developers as there are very few websites that could take advantage of accelerated CSS filters.

Chromium supports SVG and CSS acceleration on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS. Additional experimental GPU acceleration features include GPU accelerated painting as well as GPU compositing on all pages. We were not able to determine any performance gains as those new features appear to be unstable and produced crashes in HTML5 benchmarks such as WebViz.

IE9 was the first browser that introduced SVG acceleration with the first platform preview of IE9 in March of last year.